Wear not, waste not?

Last week we related our shopping adventures in NYC, where we were prepared to drop some coin but came away with just a few things. Maybe it was because we were staying near the Garment District, or maybe it was racks upon racks of discount goods and thrift shops we perused, but after a few days, we began to get more and more alarmed by the sheer volume of clothing — there, and in the world.

Designer knockoff PVC purses, in a rainbow of colors, crowd the street corners. In the Garment District, dingy storefronts are filled with everything from tacky “urban” sportswear to suits and dresses that seemed destined for a suburban Dress Barn. We visited two sample sales (a local recreational sport for fashionistas) with the euphemistic “overstock” and “closeout” merchandise that failed to yield anything we wanted to pack home, even at 50 to 70 percent off.

Between brick and mortar and click and mortar places, surely we’ve reached a saturation point. Where does all this stuff go if isn’t sold, and even if is? Sure, some things end up handed down to siblings, given to friends, taken to clothing swaps, donated to thrift stores or resold on eBay. But much of it doubtlessly ends up in landfills. The global manufacturing industry causes its own set of problems, both for workers and environment, in an attempt to keep up with consumers’ insatiable appetites. (Denim is a particular offender — “Gross,” in the words of Zolita boutique owner Jules Mancilla, who tipped us to the recent “China Blue” documentary.)

The New York Times wrote about the issue of sustainable clothing earlier in the year (available to Times Select subscribers only), noting:

But clothes — and fast clothes in particular — are a large and worsening source of the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming, because of how they are both produced and cared for, concludes a new report from researchers at Cambridge University titled “Well Dressed?”

“Fast clothes,” more commonly called “fast fashion,” continue to dominate in the marketplace — H&M, Forever 21 and others are the new favorites, crowding out former standard-bearers like the Gap, and even Old Navy. The idea is they’re so cheap that it doesn’t matter if you wear them just a few times, and the rap is that they fall apart easily. But we’ve been wearing certain items for years and haven’t found a noticeable dip in quality. And companies are increasingly responding to labor practice concerns, and introducing organic materials.

Surprisingly, a polyester garment requires less energy over time than a cotton shirt, due its less-intensive washing and maintenance requirements, according to the Times article.

Of course, the best way to lessen one’s impact is to consume less.

The article concludes:

To cut back the use of carbons and make fashion truly sustainable, shoppers will have “to own less, to have less stuff,” Dr. Allwood said. “And that is a very hard sell.”

We sure haven’t figured it out yet, but we’re sitting out the current department store trifecta of sales, and repairing all the clothes piled up in the closet instead while we continue to ponder the issue.